The Transparent Society - Search without Friction

A part of lived experience that may change as society becomes more transparent through the proliferation of user-accessible surveillance media is the idea of the 'search'. As the algorithms of google, facebook and the rest become more sophisticated at guessing and predicting our needs, so the sensation of being confronted by problems that we need to search for answers for will diminish. That sense of a gap between not knowing something, or not having access to something, and this something appearing (a gap filled with a consciousness-creating search) will grow smaller and smaller. More and more accurate Google results will present themselves to in less and less time and there will be only the merest interval into which our self becomes activated. And then this gap will close completely. Like the marketing tools that analyse our emails and browser histories, predicting which products we might want to buy even before we are aware of the desire, so all information will fill the spaces around us. At that point the surface of the world will meet the surface of our selves in a marriage of perfect snugness. There will be no friction in this contact as the need to search for answers to problems and products to purchase is removed.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• The
• Transparent
• Society
• Search
• without
• Friction
• Google
• problem
• solution
• distributed
• intelligence
• boundary
• horison
• internal
• external
• facebook
• gmail
• David
• Brin

[whimppy]

just realized how much i appreciate conferencereport. i went to one of TJ's vids and you cannot have a talk with people in the comments. you get 10 new comments every minute and there are thousands of people who see them. Any discourse is ruined, and most of those people are a little inadequate in the idea side. Most of the comments here add to the ideas you present. Most of the comments in TJ's vids are jokes or sometimes stereotypical fights of athiest/conservative/whatever

[U5312N4M34Y0UTU133]

@whimppy

And any questions that anybody has, can PM and definitely will PM back.

[U5312N4M34Y0UTU133]

@whimppy

Does this include this user?

Appreciate this sentiment in advance, if so.

[U5312N4M34Y0UTU133]

It's fine being an information consumer: an addiction would be constantly not using information that IS consumed.

Information with independent input is fine... but automated predicting bots that flood any user with what they're looking for, before they even type it in... that's overly dictating and moronic.

[jmeiskues]

i've been thinking about this same idea, our access to information getting faster and faster.  we being to expect to have all the information we want in an increasingly shorter amount of time. information addiction!

[specialmike140]

thats terrifying, outsourcing of my effort to some strange network.

[PaganGlade]

"YouTube on steroids" lol

[esaman]

"Transparency" in context of society usually refers to lack of secrets, that information is in public access. Radically transparent society would have no privacy.

[U5312N4M34Y0UTU133]

This is putting what exists now, completely out of context, to what could exist in a transparent society.

First of all, this removes aspiration, and means that people are completely predictable. People can't be completely predictable, because there would have to be a universal entanglement that was instantaneous, to every single moment and thing that happened, that could be measured, to also be predicted. Humans are at one end of a scale of this universe, quantum particles at another.